Most people create a blog to help back promote their products and strengthen their brand, but you don’t actually need a website to achieve that need.
Just a landing page or an affiliate link and the right advertising campaign would be sufficient for the above. But what if you don’t want to sell a product at all? Can you make a completely passive income from a website or blog alone?
The answer is: yes and no.
Over time, if you build a website up to be big enough and provide a huge amount of valuable free information, if you can rank at the top of Google and if you can build an active community, then, in theory, you should get a massive flow of traffic that will be self-sustaining for several years, without you having to have any further input.
If you then place advertising on this website, then you can potentially earn a sustainable blog and potentially substantial passive income.
To build a successful website or blog that makes money, you will need to constantly create and publish new content that people want to read and share. But this will take a lot of time and a lot of luck.
Buying an Established Website or Blog
One way to get around creating all the content yourself is to find a writer (or several) and pay them to write blog posts for your site. Make sure it is good though.
Another way is to buy a website that already has a big audience and a big community and plenty of content.
To get this, you’re going to have to spend a large amount of money, but this can be a good investment if you can make that up-front expense.
Browse website reseller sites like Empire Flippers, marketing forums and webmaster forums where you’ll be able to find people selling sites and try to contact big sites directly.
A good strategy is to contact people who have a massive audience but haven’t maximized their earning potential yet with ads and affiliate links – it’s likely that they’re not going to know just how valuable their site is just yet and that means they might accept a good deal.
Another strategy is to use insider information and to target a website that’s in a niche that you think is about to become more in demand. In other words, if you have a tip-off that a big brand is about to take the world by storm and you can buy a website related to that brand or its market niche before that happens, you can stand to profit in a BIG way!
If you can buy a website that is already getting a lot of visits, then theoretically you can simply add some adverts to it or some affiliate links and start profiting immediately!
You can also reverse engineer this strategy and create blogs to sell yourself, this can be a very lucrative way to make money.
Content Marketing and Branding
That being said, there’s nothing wrong with running a blog the old fashioned way. It does not have to be a full-time business at first, but a side hustle that might lead to greater things.
This might involve a little more effort than a truly passive income model, but it’s still passive in as much as you aren’t trading time for money. And if it’s a subject you love, then you shouldn’t mind writing about it regularly. The key to being successful with this kind of business is again to get inside the heads of your visitors and to offer something really different and valuable.
That means creating a brand that once again will appeal to a very specific type of person rather than trying to appeal to everyone possible. You need to think about branding your site so that people will instantly know what your site is all about and whether it is for them and you need to be very consistent in delivering quality content that is also going to offer something a bit different from the competition.
Don’t think that you can make a lot of money by populating a generic site with generic content like ‘How to Get a Six Pack’ in only 500 words. If you want to be the next Neil Patel, then you need to write about things that are interesting and that no one has read before. That might mean a new product or training technique, or it might mean a challenging intellectual expose to a particular aspect of training.
It means writing in a way that is entertaining and engaging and it means writing in a way that is in-depth and provides links to useful resources. Then it means building up that brand’s visibility on social media, getting followers and getting people to repost and re-share your content.
It means being consistently brilliant and on-point in other words and having a clear mission statement that lets people feel like they’re part of a ‘movement’ just by following you. Again, it’s about their identity and knowing the psychology of your audience.
But meanwhile, there are also a number of useful growth hacks you can use to get surges of hits for your site. One is to write a post that will be particularly irresistible for a certain audience and then find a route to market it – in this case that might perhaps mean a community on TikTok or Facebook. Post there and if you’re fortunate, this can lead to hundreds of thousands of hits to your website overnight!
Better yet is influencer marketing. This means finding a big influencer in the niche you’re in and getting them to promote your site. Of course, that means you need to offer something else in return, whether that means you also link to them or it means that you provide them with free content.
To be successful with this, the best strategy is to start with those smaller influencers that are around your level and then slowly climb the ladder.
Each time you get a shout-out from one of them, you’ll gain more new followers and you’ll be able to approach someone even bigger next time!
The best way to get some influencer marketing and make big money from a blog quickly is to network in person with someone who happens to own a massive website or social media profile. It’s not easy, but it is possible!
More Strategies for Earning Passive Income From a Website
There are other ways you can earn a truly passive income from a website too if you so wish. One is to use a subscription model. There are plenty of WordPress plugins that will allow you to do this easily and completely for free and if your content is compelling enough, you might find people are willing to sign up, thus creating a recurring income that is much more stable and reliable than you may get from ads!
Even donations using a service like Patreon for example can work as a monetisation model. Or what about having a ‘pay wall’ for your very best content like on OnlyFans?
This works particularly well for those ‘static websites’ that act like large repositories for information. That kind of business model is most effective when you target a niche that relies on lots of information. Targeting specific careers and industries can work very well for example, as can providing a resource for people studying a particular topic.
Another option is to create a ‘SAS’ or ‘Software As a Service’ website. This might mean making an online calculator, or a tool that organizes people by providing to-do lists, a CMS or a dating website that you can charge a membership fee to use.
This will require a little coding skill but you can either handle that yourself or outsource it to a coder through a site like UpWork or Fiverr.
In Summary
If you take the time to build up a good blog or website or have the money to buy a ready-made established one, the list of monetisation options are endless.
Having an established platform that gets a large amount of traffic (visitors) is a great way to receive a passive income.
